LinuxPower interviews Jim Gettys: one of the original X Window
developers. Though the discussion ranges from Mr. Gettys’ role on
the GNOME Foundation to the need for a good audio server, a large
portion is spent discussing the use of X on handhelds as opposed to
framebuffers, why X isn’t as bloated as many claim, and why a
network-transparent foundation makes sense for the GUI’s of
tomorrow’s handhelds.
“No, I believe very strongly that either GTK+fb or QtE
are dead ends. Our experience in the market (beyond the hacker
community) is that the major attraction is the ability to share
with little or no hassle applications written for the desktop:
while the applications may need reworking to deal with the screen
size and touchscreen, there are many applications not written for
GNOME (or KDE). Network transparency is worth a lot in PDA’s such
as an iPAQ: it is really a full fledged networked computer in your
hand, which can take advantage of other displays, keyboards, etc.
in the user’s environment when convenient. If I have a lot of text
to enter, I don’t want to use a touch-screen unless I must, and I
don’t want to have to build two applications, the way Palm or WinCE
does. Others will experimentally determine that frame buffer based
environments are a waste of time, but we won’t…”